Reading

It can be hard reading books in French. The books I took back to the library this week were:

Diabolus in Musica by Yann Apperry. One-quarter read. It may have won the Prix Médicis 2000 but I was deeply unimpressed with it. It tries so hard, with its absurdly flowery extended language, but just seems juvenile.

Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee. Half-read. Maybe it's just more difficult in French. But many of the reviewers on Amazon seem bemused by it. Basically it's a set of lectures on literary subjects, supposedly delivered by the protagonist, dressed in a thin coat of narrative so that it passes as a novel.

De la Terre à la Lune by Jules Verne. I didn't even start this because I was so occupied with the others. However this is the one that I've renewed for the holidays.

I'm also ploughing through Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, this time in English but not much more comprehensible for that. I will persevere for a bit longer since it's a novel that has a fanatical following ("The greatest work of literature since Ulysses" and suchlike). 100 pages in and some of the threads are beginning to come together.